Polish military plane crash tied to budget cuts

Warsaw, April 1 (DPA) A military plane crash in northern Poland was linked to budget cuts that forced pilots to cut back on flight time, reported the daily Rzeczpospolita Wednesday. Four people died in northern Poland near Gdansk Tuesday when a military transporter crashed while landing during a training flight. The Bryza transport plane went up in flames as it crash-landed, local media reported.

Two weeks earlier, Rzeczpospolita reported, pilots had told the daily they would only fly for 20 minutes once a week because of budget cutbacks.

“We’ll soon kill ourselves… Unfortunately we won’t keep up our skills from books,” the daily quoted the pilots as saying.

Poland’s government recently cut its 2009 budget by 19.7 billion zloty ($5.6 billion) as it’s begun to feel the effects of the global financial recession.

The country’s Ministry of National Defence plans cutbacks totalling some 2 billion zloty.